The Norwegian-founded company’s vertically integrated NEO factory in Hayward marks the first U.S.-scale push to install a general-purpose humanoid robot in private homes, with shipments planned this year and a competitive field already crowded.
1X Technologies has opened a 58,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Hayward, California, to produce its NEO humanoid robot at consumer scale, with capacity for 10,000 units in the first year and a goal of more than 100,000 units annually by the end of 2027.
The Norway-founded, OpenAI-backed company described the plant as the first vertically integrated humanoid robot factory in the United States. The first shipments to customers are planned for 2026.
The factory currently employs over 200 people and is growing. NEO is manufactured with critical components manufactured in-house – motors, batteries, structures, drive systems, textiles and sensors – in a configuration the company describes as upstream American manufacturing.
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“This is more than just a factory opening, it’s proof that the future of humanoid robotics is being built right here in the US.” 1X CEO and founder Bernt Børnich said in the announcement.
The Hayward facility is intended to be a stepping stone to a larger plant under construction in San Carlos, California.
the product
NEO is positioned as a general-purpose home robot, designed to operate alongside humans in home environments rather than as an industrial biped for warehouses or factories.
The robot is available in three colors (tan, gray and dark brown) and is offered through two commercial models: an early access purchase for $20,000 with priority delivery in 2026, or a subscription for $499 per month.
NEO is powered by Nvidia’s Jetson Thor embedded computing platform and is trained using Nvidia’s Isaac open robotics simulation framework.
Demand has reportedly exceeded initial expectations. The company says the first year’s production capacity was sold out five days after pre-orders opened in October 2025.
1X raised $100 million in its effort to bring NEO to market; The robot is designed with explicit safety constraints: It is lightweight, soft to the touch, and configured without pinch points or other hazards, a deliberate choice given the company’s ambition to deploy in private homes rather than industrial environments, where heavier, tougher humanoids dominate.
NEO learns household tasks through embedded AI, the technique by which robots gain skills by interacting with their environment. Customers can also demonstrate tasks manually using virtual reality headsets and controllers, and the robot includes conversational functionality that Børnich has likened to ChatGPT.
Whether those capabilities translate into reliable performance across the variety of unstructured tasks that a real home presents, the open question for every humanoid consumer, is one that customer shipments later this year will begin to answer.
Two routes to the market
Beyond the consumer product, 1X has structured its business strategy around a parallel business track. In December 2025, the company partnered with private equity firm EQT to deploy up to 10,000 NEOs to EQT portfolio companies between 2026 and 2030 across facilities, manufacturing, logistics and healthcare operations.
The two-way structure offers 1x business margin from its first units, plants and warehouses pay full price for performance, while the in-house model can reduce cost over time. It’s the same playbook that electric vehicles followed, with commercial and luxury customers subsidizing the consumer launch.
The annual production target of 10,000 units is a significant figure in a field where most humanoid robot manufacturers still number in the hundreds. Tesla, however, is the comparison that matters most. Tesla China President Wang Hao described the Shanghai Gigafactory as a The “golden key” to mass production the company’s humanoid robot Optimus. Tesla has discussed manufacturing a few hundred Optimus units in 2026, rising to thousands and then tens of thousands annually by 2027 and 2028, with internal targets of one million units per year from Shanghai that have not been confirmed in any public filing.
Elon Musk’s long-stated goal is to price Optimus below $20,000 per unit, the same price at which 1X sells early access NEOs today.
China’s humanoid robotics sector is advancing rapidly in parallel. Unitree’s G1 and H1 robots are commercially available at prices well below Tesla’s stated targets. Agibot, UBTECH, Fourier Intelligence and a growing list of Chinese startups are targeting the same market.
China’s central and local governments have identified humanoid robots as a strategic technology, with subsidies and political support that other regions have been slower to match. Competitive dynamics pit 1X’s vertically integrated American manufacturing approach against Chinese state-backed scale and Tesla’s automotive manufacturing infrastructure simultaneously.
Europe is also building. Neura Robotics, founded in Germany in 2019, has grown to more than 600 employees and raised €120 million in January 2025. Founder David Reger told TNW that he sees Tesla as its only real competitor in the segment.
The European humanoid robotics sector is positioning regulatory clarity – the AI Act, the updated Product Liability Directive, the General Product Safety Regulation and the Machinery Regulation – as a competitive advantage, arguing that investors and industrial partners commit resources when compliance risks are predictable.
Opening the factory is the easy part. Making a humanoid robot at scale, while difficult, is fundamentally a known engineering problem, with known suppliers and known cost curves. The tougher question, which no manufacturer has definitively answered yet, is whether a general-purpose home robot can perform the variety of unstructured tasks required by a private home at a level for which customers would pay $20,000 or $499 a month.
1X’s answer to that question is, in part, ship and iterate. Robots produced at the Hayward facility are currently being sent for internal testing, validation and to the company’s own research and development laboratory and internal home testing programs before customer deliveries begin.
The vertically integrated manufacturing approach was specifically chosen to allow for rapid hardware iteration as feedback arrives. Whether that iteration speed is fast enough to close the gap between the demos on the pitch reel and the messy reality of the average American home is ultimately the bet behind the entire factory.
